Developers willing to dish out the $400 required for an unlocked Dev Phone 1 won’t be happy to find that access to paid market applications has been disabled by Google. It was possibly done to sloppily patch up a loophole that supposedly gave users of the unlocked phone the ability to download all applications for free. What little information Google would give as to why they made this decision included, “These phones give developers of handset software full permissions to all aspects of the device… We aren’t distributing copy protected applications to these phones in order to minimize unauthorized copy of the applications.” What makes this more interesting is that, at least according to Engadget, an unlocked original G1 doesn’t have this limitation. It’s rather ironic that a developer using said phone won’t be able to access his or her own paid app. Let’s hope Google remedies this quickly as you never know when an angry mob of app-deprived developers will storm the Googleplex with torches and sporks.
Ugh, they didn’t implement DRM in DevPhone 1?!?! What a mistake!
But seriously, that’s not nice, Google. I have given up on thinking their policy of “not being evil” is valid anymore.
There’s a pretty broad line between being dickish and being evil. This is dickish. Their data mining is borderline evil, though mostly opt-in.
Speaking as an owner of a dev G1, if you flash the G1 with the JF firmware you can see commercial apps. It is really only a limitation for those who stick with the default ADP 1.0 firmware and I am not sure why anyone would want to do that.
I have seen conflicting reports of some apps still being blocked in google market even from a flashed phone, but I could not see anything missing.